But if he was right about how the Bugs had known when to launch, then presumably they also had a good notion of what they faced, and while Bugs were capable of suicidal attritional attacks no human admiral would contemplate for a moment, they were also capable of a much higher degree of subtlety than he could have wished. And by now they'd had ample opportunity to analyze standard Allied doctrine for using fighters to blunt gunboat attacks . . . and to come up with a response of their own.
The Enemy's small craft swept towards the gunboats, and there were rather more of them than had been anticipated. Of course, there were also more Enemy starships than expected, as well. Clearly the picket which had detected them when they passed through this system months before had missed almost half of them. That was most unfortunate. With more accurate initial information, a larger force could have been dispatched to absolutely insure these intruders' destruction. As it was, reinforcements had been called for, but it was unlikely they could arrive in time to affect the issue.
On the other hand, the Fleet should have sufficient strength on hand to deal with the situation, despite the numbers of Enemy small craft so far detected. A matter for somewhat greater concern than the absolute numbers was the presence of gunboats among the more usual attack craft. Their presence had been completely unexpected, and no provision had been made for their ability to mount standard shipboard anti-attack craft missiles on their ordnance racks. There was neither time nor means to adjust for their presence, however, and the second wave of the fleet's own gunboats separated from their racks.
"We have a second gunboat wave coming in from zero-zero-two zero-six-three, at least as strong as the first, Admiral!" Chau reported tersely. "Range is only two light-minutes. Tracking is picking up some of the launch platforms now. They look like battlecruisers. CIC designates this Force Beta, Sir."
Prescott grunted, but it wasn't really a surprise. Either the Bugs had gotten an excellent passive sensor lock on them as they made transit and managed to hold them long enough to project their course, or else they already knew which warp point the flotilla was bound for. It didn't really matter which at the moment. What did matter was that, armed with their knowledge, they'd managed to position their units so as to catch SF 62 between two forces . . . and one of them was between Prescott and the only way home. Worse, the second one was in front of him on his present course, positioned so that he had to close with it if he meant to keep running away from the first gunboat wave. And worse yet, with that many starships, plus the gunboats' onboard scanners, the Bugs must know precisely where Prescott's forces were. The fighter and gunboat launch would have defined a general locus for them, just as the second wave's launch had pinpointed Force Beta for Concorde's sensors, for not even the best ECM could defeat that horde of passive and active sensors when it knew where to look. And once they'd been located the first time, dropping back into cloak and evading would be enormously more difficult.
Yet one aspect of the Bugs' tactics did puzzle him. The new gunboat wave was headed to join the first in a clear bid to engage Shaarnaathy's fighters and gunboats rather than trying to pounce on SF 62's starships while its fighter cover was away. The flotilla's shipboard weapons would undoubtedly have inflicted heavy casualties on the gunboats if they'd come in on the ships, but Bugs had never shied away from losses before, and it would probably have been their best shot at getting in among the datagroups. So why-?
Of course. The Bugs knew his carriers' strikegroups were both his primary defense against kamikaze small craft and his best offensive weapon, and they wanted to destroy that weapon before they sought a decisive engagement. Or they might be present in sufficient strength to feel confident of crushing the flotilla in a standard ship-to-ship engagement if Prescott's fighters could simply be whittled down. Yet either way, he had no choice but to meet the gunboats head-on and try to whittle them down, and at least his own strikegroups were positioned to engage the two Bug forces sequentially and in isolation. It would probably be his best opportunity to defeat the gunboats in detail. It might also be the only one he got, and so he said nothing as his pilots' icons began to merge in the plot with the angry red hash of the Bug gunboats' first wave.
The Cormorants' human-crewed gunboats struck first, and they hit the Bugs hard. The enemy clearly hadn't expected to face such units, for they'd opted to equip their own craft with standard fighter missiles. Against pure fighter opposition, that made sense, since they could fit far more of the smaller fighter-sized missiles onto their racks. But the human gunboats were armed with all-up AFHAWKs, and they salvoed their less numerous but heavier weapons from outside even FM2 range.
Brief, vicious fireballs spalled the Bug formation as the big missiles tore home, and almost half the first wave was destroyed before it could get a shot off in reply. But the remainder kept coming, and now it was their turn, for unlike the fighters which opposed them, they had point defense. They had to enter the fighters' range to engage them, but they stood an excellent chance of picking off return missile fire, and they arrowed straight at the Terran and Ophiuchi strikegroups behind a cloud of missiles of their own.
They ignored the human gunboats completely, electing not to waste missiles against the bigger vessels' matching point defense, and now explosions glared among SF 62's defenders. The tornado of fighter-launched missiles was sufficient to wipe out virtually all the Bugs, despite their point defense, without ever entering energy weapon range, but Prescott felt a cold sense of foreboding as he watched his plot. The two or three first-wave gunboats to evade destruction were no longer headed for the flotilla. They were breaking off, turning to run from the fighters rather than trying to get through to his starships, and that was very unlike standard Bug tactics.
The fugitives' courses back towards their launch platforms took them directly away from their own second wave. Perhaps they hoped the Allied fighters, feeling the pressure of the second wave bearing down upon them, would turn to face it and let the survivors make good their escape. If so, they were wrong, and Prescott clenched his teeth on his pipe as his faster fighters went in pursuit. They ran down the escapees and nailed them, not without losses of their own, then wheeled once more and turned back as the second Bug wave drew into extreme missile range. Again clouds of missiles erupted into his fighters' formations, and this time the long-range losses were completely one-sided, for there were no answering Allied missiles. But they were only one-sided for the time it took the vengeful human and Ophiuchi pilots to overtake the slower gunboats, despite their efforts to evade, and rip them apart with energy fire.
A sidebar in his plot gave his losses, and he felt a spasm of pain as he absorbed them. Only two of his gunboats had been destroyed, but twenty-one of his eighty-plus fighters were dead. The Bugs had lost well over twice that many units, and each of theirs carried much larger crews than his fighters, but they were Bugs. There was no such thing as an "acceptable rate of exchange" against Bugs . . . and he'd lost almost a quarter of his own fighter strength in killing them.